Review: Johnny Cash - Songs Of Our Soil (1959)
Tracks: 1) Drink To Me; 2) Five Feet High And Rising; 3) The Man On The Hill; 4) Hank And Joe And Me; 5) Clementine; 6) The Great Speckled Bird; 7) I Want To Go Home; 8) The Caretaker; 9) Old Apache Squaw; 10) Don’t Step On Mother’s Roses; 11) My Grandfather’s Clock; 12) It Could Be You; 13*) I Got Stripes; 14*) You Dreamer You.
REVIEW
Here is yet another short, but sweet collection, reflecting just how much «the Spirit» stayed on Cash’s side in his early years — nothing here could be called a stylistic or musical departure from his average pattern of the time, yet most of the songs still manage to be charmingly endearing after a couple of listens or so. Perhaps the most innovative thing about it is the title — if you notice, for the first time ever here is a Johnny Cash LP whose title in no way refers to the name or personality of Johnny Cash himself, but instead makes it look as if that personality has been humbly dissolved in the vastness and depth of the American «soil». In reality, this is but an illusion — everything Johnny ever recorded gets filtered through the lens of his own personality, and I wouldn’t dare place an equality sign between «Johnny Cash» and «Americana». But it is still nice to see him come out with an album title that does not place full emphasis on individual star power.
Actually, the title itself might be a little misleading: «soil» here has to be understood in the overriding sense of «homeland» rather than specifically having to do with tilling the earth — there’s a bit of that, too, but in general, Songs Of Our Soil is a series of musical-lyrical vignettes whose characters are all over the place, and if there is one central theme to it all, it’s the matter of toiling through life, growing old, and meeting your maker. In his autobiography, Johnny admitted himself that death was very much on his mind at the time (largely due to the demise of his brother); still, if this were really an album about death, most of the songs would have some sort of proto-‘Sister Morphine’ vibe, which they do not — and it would be a rather strange thing to make Death the central topic of an album called Songs Of Our Soil, as it could, in a way, imply that America is the country par excellence where people come to die, think about nothing but death, and get death served to them in a faster and more assured way than anywhere else. (A picture not wholly alien to at least some people of the extreme-left persuasion, but, to the best of my knowledge, Cash never associated himself with such people).
In fact, the album is about Survival just as much as it is about Death — take one of the record’s most classic and well-known songs, for instance, which is ‘Five Feet High And Rising’. Johnny intentionally sets the verses to an old «dance-blues» melody stemming from songs like Robert Johnson’s ‘They’re Red Hot’ and others, as if to emphasize the «game» aspects of an endangered family fleeing from the water element — the constantly repeated, impending, ever-growing threat of "two feet high and risin’", "three feet high and risin’" does not feel so much as impending doom as it feels like the «cat element» in a dangerous, but unpredictable game of cat-and-mouse. The steady threat of the chorus keeps interlocking with the busy hustle of the verse, yet there’s an air of humorous irony rather than despair about it ("looks like we’ll be blessed with a little more rain"), which is certainly a very American thing to have — most of the pre-war country blues songs about tough times share pretty much the same attitude.
In ‘The Man On The Hill’, the central motive is that of God’s will — each verse sets up a living problem with a lively country rhythm ("I ain’t got no Sunday shoes that I can wear to town", that sort of thing), then slows things down as if in a state of brief deliberation on the subject, then picks up speed again with the universal answer ("Yes I will, I’ll ask the man on the hill"). Once again, there’s nothing particularly complicated, but Johnny’s use of speed and pause brings in an extra level of theatricality and symbolism that you will rarely encounter in true old-time «Americana». It’s also a nice way to bring back the importance of faith without blaring too much Jesus Christ in your face.
When, eventually, we get around to the songs in which Death, like it or not, is the main theme, it is still surrounded by an aura of calm, if not humble, acceptance. In ‘Hank And Joe And Me’, a tale of an unfortunate ending to a treasure hunt in the desert, neither Hank, nor Joe, nor the protagonist seem to express much discontent with their lot; judging by the lyrics, the phrasing, the vocal tone, the melody, it’s more of a «well, we blew it, tough luck, meet you in the next world or something» attitude. I think that nobody has ever pronounced a phrase like "leave him there and let him die, I can’t stand to hear him cry for water" in a more emotionless tone than Johnny does in the chorus. It’s not a song about being punished for greed, or about the silliness and hopelessness of man’s grand plans, or about unendurable suffering for inadequate reasons. It’s just a song about how life sometimes ends in death sooner than we’d probably expect it — nothing particularly horrible or unjust about it, just the way of nature. "Death is a natural part of life, rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force", that kind of thing.
The same feeling of un-sentimental acceptance of one’s fate runs through the entire mini-gallery of characters portrayed in the album, be it the old gravedigger presaging his own death (‘The Caretaker’), the Indian woman with her baggage of suffering accumulated through the years (‘Old Apache Squaw’), or the ninety-year old clock, belonging to the protagonist’s grandfather, which "stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died" (‘My Grandfather’s Clock’). These songs are not nearly as well (or at least, not as intriguingly) construed as ‘The Man On The Hill’ or ‘Five Feet High’ (although ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’ nicely incorporates the sound of a pendulum into its stop-and-start structure), but thematically, they are perfectly integrated with the rest; if the first few songs have already sucked you in, they will simply go on to be part of the same journey through a portrait gallery of tired and exhausted faces who, despite all the beatings they have taken, still believe in the inevitability of the life-and-death cycle.
Right in the middle of the album, Cash inserts a sequence of three cover songs. Billy and Buddy Mize’s ‘Clementine’ (little to do with the traditional ‘My Darling Clementine’ as heard in the 1946 Western, other than the chorus), a rather generic tale of yet another senseless shootout, is the least notable of the three; but the inclusion of ‘The Great Speckled Bird’, the only song here that actually puts a positive twist on the idea of Death, supposedly brings a bit more sense and purpose to the life-and-death cycle. Johnny knows best not to overuse the cliché of «death as liberation», but being a good Christian and all, he can hardly allow himself not to mention it at all, now can he?
The most curious addition, however, is that of ‘I Want To Go Home’, which is the way Johnny retitled ‘The John B. Sails’, even better known to us as ‘Sloop John B’ after the Pet Sounds version. By surrounding the song with all those portraits of toilsome lives and inevitable deaths, and by placing the emphasis on the last line of its chorus, he somehow manages to transform the song into a plea for liberation from this world’s suffering — the entire "I feel so homesick, I wanna go home" idea really locks into the "I’ll be joyfully carried to meet him / On the wings of the great speckled bird" message of the previous song. In the hands of Brian Wilson, it would become a song about the insufferability of alienation – an allegory for the same thing that was more directly sung about in ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ – but in the context of Songs Of Our Soil, it’s just another song about how we (a) are born to suffer, (b) have to accept death as a natural and, sometimes, welcome end to our suffering, (c) and what’s wrong with that?
Yet in spite of this stoical life philosophy, Johnny still decides to end the record with ‘It Could Be You’, which could thematically be perceived as an outtake from Hymns — the only song on the album that actually constitutes a call to action rather than a statement of fact. The plea to the listeners that we should "lend a hand, say a prayer, give a smile that he might share" applies to pretty much all the protagonists of these vignettes, giving life a bit of a more colorful outlook. In fact, the conceptuality of the album is even more reinforced by the fact that each of its two sides is rounded off with one of the only two properly «optimistic» — not to mention Christian-themed — songs: ‘The Great Speckled Bird’, which teaches one to view Death as merely the beginning of something much grander, and ‘It Could Be You’, which gives one a recommendation on how to make Life more acceptable to those who have a hard time going through it. This detail might be very easily overlooked, but for an epoch in which conceptual cycles of songs with a well thought-out sequencing were largely unheard of, it is actually quite important.
Some CD issues of the album throw on a couple bonus tracks, the most important of which is ‘I Got Stripes’, one of Johnny’s most famous jail-themed anthems; released as a non-LP single in mid-1959, it could have very easily fit right inside Songs Of Our Soil, what with its fast-paced and humorous presentation of an inmate’s life story and its consequences. (On the other hand, ‘You Dreamer You’, the original B-side to ‘Frankie’s Man, Johnny’, is a completely different story — way too romantic and sentimental to be compatible with the record’s aura of cheerful darkness). Of course, plenty of other songs from Johnny’s other singles and LPs could have fit in just as well — the «Man In Black» began earning his title way earlier than he granted it to himself, after all. But the fact remains that this is the first time in Cash’s history when he created his own personal thematic collection based around an artistic theme rather than a pre-established genre (as on Hymns), and for many, given the relative freshness and youthful strength of his genius at the time, it might forever remain the best one.